Legendary Inventors – Gen Con 2016

There are a bunch of inventions out there in the world that haven’t been invented yet, and who better to invent them than the most legendary inventors of all?

In Legendary Inventors, you’ve got a team of, you know, famous inventors from history competing against other teams to be the most awesome at inventing things. You start in the early ages, perhaps with an invention like Fire.

Well SOMEONE has to invent it

On your turn you can either activate one of your inventors or refresh all of your inventors so they can be used again.

When you activate an inventor, you get to add cubes of your color to one invention. Each inventor has points spread across the four different scientific fields of the game – electricity, chemistry, mechanics (or something) and math. Each point lets you add a cube to the corresponding symbol on an invention.

When every slot on an invention is filled, that invention is completed. Whoever played the most cubes gets first pick between tokens placed on the card, and the card itself. Tokens can be straight up points, special abilities (like refreshing all of your scientists immediately with coffee) or improved numbers you can add to the inventors card. Take a look:

This was my legendary team. You can start new skills at 1 or improve existing skills in increments of 1.

If you choose to take the card, you get points, but you can also build sets with those cards to earn bonus points.

In addition, each scientist has a specific skill goal on their tile, and if you can improve their skills to meet or exceed those goals you earn even more points.

The game ends after three rounds and the highest points wins.

It’s definitely a light engine building game. It plays quickly and the rules are straightforward; more of a family game in terms of complexity. The component design is neat, with the little number tokens you fit into your inventor slots, and it is kind of fun to build up your team over the game until you’re placing four or five cubes on a turn instead of two. Also worth noting both male and female inventors are featured.

It’s also the kind of game where you can never quite do everything you want to do – not enough Inventions to go around, not enough time to complete everything you want, not enough tokens to upgrade all your inventors – so you just have to do what you can and hope it’s enough.